One of the joys of Empire Presents... Big Screen came in the much-storied shape of Raiders Of The Lost Ark producer Roberts Watts. The Raiders, **Star Wars **and Bond man took to the stage with an Ark's worth of recollections to delight the full house packed into the nostalgic 'Memories of Raiders' session.
“We were shooting pick-ups on Star Wars and George (Lucas) brought me this script," Watts told a captivated crowd. "I took it away and read it that night, thinking, 'Wow, this is a busy film!' George told me I was going to have to meet Steven Spielberg in LA. Strangely enough I knew someone who’d worked with him on 1941 and he said, 'Expect him to go 40 percent over [schedule]'. So I thought, 'Oh God'.
"I told Steven that I’d laid it out over a 23 week period and he looked at me and said, ‘No, I don’t need that long. Take six weeks out of it.’ We shot in 15 weeks. It’d have never happened to me before. Coming off [commercial flop] 1941, Steven was out to prove something, and I think that speed and energy is reflected in the energy of the film. I’ve never seen anyone work so fast on such complex material."
“The first thing I noticed is that pyramids aren’t in it and the Nile’s not in it. Shooting in a big country like Egypt is much harder than somewhere like Tunisia, where we’d shot Star Wars,” Watts told a rapt audience that the canyon where Indy springs his Nazi ambush is the same ravine in which Jawas pulled a similar trick on R2-D2 and C-3PO in Star Wars. Utinni!
There were other fascinating movie overlaps. The Nazi U-Boat Indy clambers aboard, boasting surely the best CV of all movie submarines, was used on Wolfgang Petersen’s Das Boot. Watts remembered travelling to Bavaria Studio to negotiate its use and on to La Rochelle for filming. Add ‘U-Boats’ to ‘children’ and ‘animals’ on that list of filming no-no’s. “It had a Volvo engine in it,” laughed Watts, “and we weren’t allowed to take it out if the waves were higher than one metre. I can’t tell you how many people were getting seasick. George Lucas’s face was bright green.”
The Well of Souls was the next stop-off on the magical memory tour. Watts explained that he’d organised 2500 snakes for the scene but Spielberg, a lot less snake-phobic than Indy, demanded 7500 of the little slivery blighters. So where do you go about sourcing 5000 snakes in a hurry? “Funnily enough, Amsterdam,” grinned Watts. “It’s a place where people trade with animals. We went for the tapirs at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey too.” If, like us, the scene makes you shiver, rest assured that the snakes weren’t, for instance, taipans and mambas. “We used glass snakes mainly,” explained the producer, “and they’d wriggle around a lot but they couldn’t hurt you. We had some pythons too. The cobra was behind glass.”
There was one a particularly awesome reveal. It turns out that Watts was the first man to be chased by that rolling stone. “Steven said ‘Robert, go up there, we’ll roll the ball and you run away from it.’ So I started running, chased by this giant ball when suddenly I was confronted by this wall made from a piece of two-by-four with this big ball in pursuit. Somehow I managed to scramble over it. I enquired afterwards if they’d have been able to stop the boulder. “No,” was the answer.”
The questions cames thick and fast from the audience, including one doozy gently enquiring exactly how good Tom Selleck’s Indy would have been. “Personally, I think Harrison Ford was born to play Indiana Jones,” straight-batted Watts. “I’m not saying Tom Selleck wouldn’t be fantastic but he did a TV pilot (for Magnum, P.I.) - one in ten of those gets picked up – and suddenly we’d lost our Indiana Jones. Then something suggested that we might have Indy in our own back yard, and I’m glad it was Harrison, he was an old friend.”